Friends - Recycling Initiatives

Last Thursday the team from Friends International came to visit the grade. They referred us back to our learning from our Urban Environments. We were showed ways in which they work with community to recycle old materials -creating jobs and beautiful products! We all tried rolling and gluing our own magazine offcuts into beads. Some of us got the hang of it...but it was fiddly work! Here are some pictures of us last week trying to create our own beads.

This week, we used some pre-made beads (created by the Friends experts) to make bracelets. We developed our mathematical literacy by first estimating how many beads their were. Groups were than asked to sort the beads out...some did this by shape, some by size, and others by colour.

Once they were sorted...children were asked to count them. At first groups tried counting them all...but soon found they needed a better system. Some made piles of ten and others sorted them into arrays. The trickiest part was then working out how many beads each group member could use for their bracelet. They applied their early division skills as they shared equally amongst the group.

When we finished with our investigation, we carefully threaded the beads onto elastic and made our own recycled paper bracelets. Here are the finished products!

What a fun Friday! Enjoy the long weekend everybody. We will see you back at school on Tuesday!

The Big Dig

In class we have been learning what archaeologists do. Today we had a 'Big Dig' - a simulated archaeological dig in our school sandpit. The area was sectioned off and students carefully and systematically searched for artifacts. We had a great time and uncovered 20 of the 21 hidden items. Tomorrow we will look closer at the objects and try to establish their possible uses. Children are being encouraged to make connections and ask the question "What does it tell me about Cambodia's Past?'

Sharing our Home Learning

We have enjoyed hearing all about student's personal artifacts. They explained their chosen items and read their descriptions to the class over the past two days. Tomorrow we will finish displaying these in a creative way and will comment on how artifacts can give us an insight into the way people live.

First Week Back

It was wonderful to have everybody back at school after an exciting Christmas break. We were thrilled to welcome Signe to our class. She joins us from Sweden and has settled in fast and made many new friends. She is a creative, enthusiastic learner who has already impressed us with her gymnastics moves and ability to adapt. Check out that smile!


When we arrived back after the break, we were thrilled to see our public art installations displayed around our school. We have been working on how we could have an impact in our community and children decided on creating a variety of artworks to brighten our environment. Their individual process can be viewed on their student pages on the right tab of this blog. Here are some of our students sharing their work. Thanks Ms Dana and Ms Alice for guiding this journey! You can see these displayed around the Elementary School.

Last week we had a busy week wrapping up our unit of inquiry on Urban Environments. On the last day we reviewed our learning an looked at how our knowledge had developed. We build a city again and this time their was a clear improvement in sustainability. Roads were replaced with cycle ways, walk ways and public transportation. There were wind turbines and solar panels as clean energy sources and many green spaces including rooftop gardens! Well done team. You even made the ISPP news!



In reading we continued to build our reading fluency by reading a variety of texts and responding to them in different ways. In this video, children are paraphrasing what they learned in a small part of text.

Catch Up

SPORTS DAY FUN

Here are some photos from the last week of semester. We had a fantastic time at our Grade 2-5 sports day. You couldn't wipe the smiles of the kids faces all day! Thanks to the PE team for organising this.

In our unit of inquiry we made comparisons between model cities like Copenhagen and Phnom Penh...identifying the similarities and differences. We continued to investigate in order to find answers to our inquiry questions. We used the creative cycle to assist us with this.

We had fun using creating our own Google Doodles in art class to end our unit.

We had a musical performance in a Public Art space. We had planned to perform on the Amphitheatre but were rained out...so our concert took place in the outdoor gym.

Updated Pictures

Ms Theary took these last week! We are a handsome bunch!

Wrapping up Our Unit

We started the week with a wonderful opportunity to watch the grade 10 drama students in action. They created their own interpretation of the book 'Where The Wild things Are' by Maurice Sendack. 

The children loved the interactive drama and were very engaged and motivated by the show. 

In class we began drawing on our own inspiration to create an artwork. We wrote artist statements to accompany our work and displayed these in class. We would love you to come and look at our learning on Monday after the Water Festival. Class will be open between 7.30 and 8.00am, and 2.00 and 3.00pm. Above are some pictures of us working on our art forms. It was wonderful witnessing the children working together to assist each-other. They are very proud of their work.

Artist Statement

Sawyer

My artwork is called Super Carrier. It is a paper mache sculpture. I used cardboard boxes, tape, hot glue, paint, straws, red and black paint, old glue sticks, cans, a chip container, paper and glue.

I chose to do this because I love ships and construction. I’ve always been interested in how ships are built and made. My Mom showed me how to do paper mache and I really like getting messy.

I am proud of my work but I would still like to do more to finish it.

When they finished their work, they reflected and made connections to the attitudes and learner profiles they demonstrated throughout this unit of inquiry.

They also worked on completing their Book Creator creative journals...which reflect their learning and responses to art forms during the past six weeks. These will be uploaded to their individual blog pages.

Poetry
In written language, we learned how to choose words carefully to write a piece of poetry. Here are some student examples of personification poems.

The Star

The star lights up at night
She sings me songs
to make me go to sleep

She runs away from the sun
But is happy to see me

She dances 
to make the Moon happy

By Dita


The Wind

Wind whispers secrets to me.
When he is angry...
he shakes trees,
knocks over trash cans,
and howls.
Soon he calms down.
Touches me softly.



By Sawyer

The Moon

The Moon smiles at me with his big round mouth.
He sings a song
to the world below
to make them fall asleep.
The Moon decorates the sky with his beautiful light.
He makes the stars...
They are his babies.

By Fraya

Water Festival
This afternoon we learned about some of the history and traditions behind the Water Festival. Then we made Origami boats.
Happy Water Festival Everyone. I hope you enjoy your week off!

Creativity

Last week we explored an important aspect of our unit of inquiry - 'Creativity'. We looked at this through many lenses and across all areas of the curriculum.

We began the week with a visit to the elementary school art exhibit 'Colour'. While we were there we reflected on the forms of art we saw, and interpreted them using our personal perspectives. We wrote responses to a favourite artwork.

During our Lab visit this week, Mr Matt helped us learn how we can turn ordinary images into art using photo editing. We explored how to take an image and make it more emotive using pic monkey. We will follow this up next week.

In mathematics, we looked at the 'Telling time' aspect of measurement, and reviewed our understanding of reading analogue and digital time.


In literacy, we continued with poetry. We learned what personification is and added ideas from this into our poets toolbox.

We also continued with guided reading and Readers Theatre. We are learning to read aloud with expression and present our plays to an audience in an animated way.

Children loved the opportunity to explore different art-forms during grade two's Community Development session this week. They chose from;

• pointillism
• origami
• puppetry
• nature art

Puppetry

Nature Art

Origami

 Pointillism

For home learning, children have been choosing from a choice board of tasks centered around the concepts;

• Imagination
• Creation

And our attitudes of;

• Appreciation
• Creativity
• Confidence

I really enjoyed seeing what the children came up with this week. They loved sharing their ideas with the class and via email. Well done team!

To end the week we connected with our grade 5 buddies. We completed an activity looking at how how perspectives differ, then go stuck into building stuff using the construction equipment.

Weekly Update

We had a busy week and managed to cram plenty of learning into our four day week.

Mathematics: We continued our learning in geometry, exploring the attributes of 2d and 3d shapes. We explored the features that defined quadrilaterals and polygons, and participated in a variety of activities to support our understanding. We also explored nets for 3d shapes. We used these songs to help reinforce our knowledge;

Polygon song

Shape Song

Art and Music: G2 began investigating into their new Unit of Inquiry this week. 

Students INVESTIGATED examples of public art around Phnom Penh and other countries in both music and art.  In art they created 'fortune tellers'.  They looked closely and thought critically about 4 examples of public art.  Students wrote sentences using sentence starters like, "I wonder...It makes me feel...This reminds me of...".  After folding their fortune tellers, students shared their artworks, thoughts and questions about one another's public art images. 

You can find out more about our learning in art, music, PE, and Foreign Languages by viewing the single subject blogs listed on the top of this page. Ms Dana and Ms Leigh have recently added examples of student learning onto the children's individual pages in the sidebar of this blog.

Literacy: We continued learning how to respond to different art forms in a structured way. We wrote responses to books, films, dances and artworks in our books, and recorded our ideas on our book creator creations on the ipads. In reading we responded to text and some groups began Reader's Theatre...presenting plays to an audience.

Unit of Inquiry:

We painted our inspiration boards this week. We will begin adding drawings, cutouts, photographs, words and natural elements to these next week. These boards will become the motivation for our final summative assessment - guiding the choices we will make when we select, create, and reflect on our own art piece. 

This week in community development we had the opportunity to learn more about artforms. We had inspiring visitors share their passions with us and had a chance to experience our choice of two workshops;

• Drama (with Angela Ascher)
• Paper Mache (with Srisuna Stelzig)
• Songwriting (with Mr Jon)
• Photography (with Ms Paula)
• Poetry (with Ms Rachel)
• Apsara Dance (with our teacher assistants)

PE: Over the past 5 weeks we have been working on invasion games in PE. Our skills have really developed!